A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  Winston and I shared another experience, one which I enjoyed. I am not so sure about Winston. Because there was so little to do for amusement in small towns, a woman made a business of traveling around the Valley with a set of child-sized wedding clothes, staging Tom Thumb weddings. Mothers of boys and girls the clothes would fit were notified and assembled with their children in “Grandma” Bedwell’s yard. I was dressed as the bride, Winston the groom. The long white dress with a veil and train seemed so beautiful to me. Winston’s black cutaway jacket, long black trousers, white waistcoat, shirt with a stiff collar, and black bow tie were uncomfortable.

  The taking of snapshots was the point of the whole event, and there we are, side by side, in my Baby Book, with Winston scowling; Winston scowling harder, seated on an apple box with Beverly’s hand on his shoulder; Beverly seated on the apple box with Winston looking sulky, his hand on her shoulder; Beverly standing alone, hands clasped in front of her, eyes modestly lowered.

  I longed to play, really play, with other children. A cousin, I somehow felt, did not count as “other children.” One spring morning, when I expressed my wish, Mother told me the stork was going to bring me a new brother or sister to play with. For a farm child, I was remarkably naïve. I accepted her story about the stork without question because many of the birth announcements that came to our mailbox showed a picture of a stork carrying in its beak a baby suspended in a diaper.

  “How will you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked.

  “Boy babies cry louder,” Mother explained.

  That afternoon, Winston came to play. Outdoors, under the lilac bushes, I told him my interesting new information about babies.

  Winston had a sister, Donna—a nice enough kid but too little to count for much, I thought—so he knew more about these things than I. “That’s not true,” he said.

  I was indignant. “It is so true. Mamma told me.”

  “It is not true,” said Winston, surprisingly superior. He took down his pants and said, “There. See, that’s how you tell a boy.”

  I was astonished and interested. Winston was right. Didn’t Mother know about this? Somehow I had a feeling she did but was hiding something from me.

  I had no answer for Winston, so I merely said, “Oh.” Then I lifted my skirt and pulled down my bloomers. Companionably, we pee-peed under the lilac bushes, adjusted our clothes, and never mentioned the matter again. And I never asked my mother another question about babies.

  Years later, when I told Mother this story, she said, “My land, I had no idea anything like that was going on under the lilac bushes.”

  Grandpa and Grandma

  When he was sixty-eight, my Grandfather Atlee decided to sell the store in Banks and retire to Yamhill. He and Frank, as he called my grandmother, had worked hard all their lives; they weren’t getting any younger, and they had earned a rest.

  I was sorry about the store, where I could help myself to gumdrops. Grandpa Atlee, a small, spry man with a bald head (but not as interesting as Uncle Fred’s bald head) and a bushy moustache, always lifted me to the counter to sit with my legs dangling, happy and proud when he told his customers, “Yes, sir. She’s the only granddaughter I got, and she’s a crackerjack.”

  My grandparents packed up their belongings and moved into two of the upstairs bedrooms for the winter until they could find a house in Yamhill. I was glad to have them; so was Mother. That winter she escaped many of her farm chores to keep books for Yamhill’s general merchandise store, where she was surrounded by people to talk to.

  A gentle dumpling of a grandmother who worried about her tendency to “put on flesh,” my grandmother sang Civil War songs she had learned in her childhood: “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” and “John Brown’s Body.” I begged for a story. Her story was always the same:

  I’ll tell you a story about Mother Morey.

  And now my story’s begun.

  I’ll tell you another

  About Jack and his brother.

  And now my story is done.

  Grandma Atlee taught me to sew. My stitches were uneven, my seams crooked, but turning scraps of cloth into blocks for a doll’s quilt gave me real satisfaction.

  Grandfather took me on his knee and, using my fingers to count, taught me “arithmeticking.” We progressed to adding and subtracting without fingers, and then to writing down the numbers on the backs of old envelopes.

  In the spring, my grandparents moved to a house I could walk to alone, pausing at the door of the carpenter shop to say hello to Bob Perry and to watch him work with saws, hammers, chisels, and planes. At the blacksmith shop I stopped to watch the smith pump the bellows that made the coals on his hearth glow, then heat a horseshoe, bend it, and nail it to the hoof of a patient horse. Once, when he was not busy, he made me a ring from a horseshoe nail. At my grandparents’ house, I paused to smell the warm red roses.

  Most of all, I enjoyed time with my grandfather when he worked in his vegetable garden, which was full of wonder and beauty: fat pods of peas, new potatoes to gather when he turned the soil, brown lettuce and pale cucumbers that Grandma floated in a bowl of diluted vinegar with a bit of sugar, ruby-veined beets and feathery carrots to be harvested for winter, tomatoes to eat warm from the sun, green onions to eat with homemade bread, corn for people instead of cattle, string beans twining their way up tepees of sticks, small muskmelons the size of baseballs, round mottled watermelons, and strawberries. Wherever my grandfather lived, he grew strawberries.

  Across the fence, Mrs. Roberts raised sunflowers for seeds to feed her noisy parrot. Grandpa explained that these plate-sized yellow flowers followed the course of the sun during the day. That was why they were called sunflowers. I often stood looking up at those heavy blossoms, watching to see if I could catch them following the sun. I could never stand still that long, but by evening there they were, facing the sun setting behind the Coast Range. I was determined to catch them the next day, but I never succeeded. I was too active. Grandpa sometimes paid me a nickel to sit still for five minutes.

  One summer day, my grandfather took me on a mysterious journey. He wouldn’t say why. We walked a mile to the train depot. Through the depot window we could hear the chittering telegraph sending and receiving messages over the humming wires strung along poles that stretched the wires far, far away.

  “When’s the train coming, Grandpa?” I asked, wild with excitement.

  “Hold your horses,” said Grandpa. “It’ll come. Don’t you worry.”

  At last the train could be heard, chuffing and tooting, and then seen, trailing smoke as it pulled into the station and waited, panting, until the conductor shouted “’Board!” and we were off on our mysterious journey.

  In McMinnville, seven miles away, we joined a crowd headed for a big tent and found seats on narrow bleachers.

  It was a dog and pony show: music, clowns, dogs in costumes walking on their hind legs, pretty ladies leading ponies in fancy trappings, all marching, dancing around and around a big wooden ring in the center of the tent.

  I was dazzled. There was so much excitement, so much to see, I couldn’t take it all in. My fingers grew sticky from Cracker Jack as I perched on the narrow board and tried to grasp every bit of this grand and lavish spectacle.

  The best part of the whole show was a clown wearing great flapping shoes who led a fox terrier with a stubby tail. On the end of this dog’s tail was an electric bulb, and then—the light was turned on! The little dog trotted happily around the ring with the light on the end of his tail flicking on and off, on and off. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt, and I couldn’t wait to tell my parents about the wonderful sight I had seen in McMinnville.

  That summer I walked back and forth between the farm and my grandparents’ house almost every day. One day I asked if I could take off my shoes and stockings when I went to visit. “Yes,” answered Mother, somewhat absentmindedly. “Don’t step on any thistles, and come home in time for supper.”

  I dropped m
y shoes and stockings on the porch, wiggled my toes, and set off down the board sidewalk between the privet hedges, heavy with fragrance, to the road. The dust, which came up to my ankles, was as warm and as soft as feathers. I kicked up little clouds and was happy.

  Then my feet began to grow warmer until I was uncomfortable. I didn’t think of turning back. On a farm, no one ever gave up. No matter how we felt, livestock had to be cared for, fields plowed, crops sown, fruit and vegetables canned.

  My feet became so hot I was in pain. I started to run, leaving a trail of dust behind me. As I ran past the blacksmith shop, I began to cry. The smith, a horse’s foot between his thighs, stopped pounding on a horseshoe to stare. Asking for help from someone not a relative did not occur to me, any more than turning back, even though my feet felt as if they were burning. By now I was covered with dust. Tears streamed down my face, leaving muddy tracks. I began to shriek with pain, but there was nothing to do but run on. “Grandpa! Grandpa!” I screamed.

  Finally my grandfather heard me and came running to see what was wrong. When he grasped what had happened, he plucked me out of the dust and carried me into the house, out of the sun. “Poor little young ’un,” he said. “You poor little young ’un.”

  “Oh, you poor child,” said my grandmother when she saw my red feet.

  My grandfather sat me on a chair and fetched a pan of cold water for my feet. My grandmother washed mud and dust from my face before she hurried to make me a glass of lemonade. I sat with my feet in the pan of water, drinking lemonade and feeling much better. The house was cool, and I was surrounded by love. “There. That’s the ticket,” said Grandpa when I stopped crying.

  That was the year Mother had said the stork was going to bring me a little brother or sister. Suddenly, one winter day, I was sent to my grandparents’ house, with my nightgown, to spend the night—a real treat for me, because Grandma always read aloud from the newspaper the “Burgess Bedtime Story,” all about Old Mother West Wind, Grandfather Frog, and rabbits that went lipperty-lop into the old brier patch. Grandpa let me look at colored pictures in his dictionary, pages of foreign flags and breeds of horses, cows, and dogs.

  I stayed all the next day, even though Grandma had walked back to the farm. When she returned, she cooked Thanksgiving dinner, which she packed in a basket. Grandpa balanced the basket on his shoulder, and we walked the muddy road home. What fun, I thought, dinner arriving in a clothes basket.

  At home, I was shocked to see Mother, pale and with her black hair tumbled on the pillow, in the four-poster bed in the downstairs bedroom. I had never before seen Mother in bed in the daytime. She managed a weak smile and told me she had not been feeling well, but she could come to the dinner table.

  Later that winter, when it occurred to me to ask when the stork was going to bring my little brother or sister, Mother merely said, “The stork changed its mind.”

  When I was an adult, Mother told me what had really happened. She had had a difficult miscarriage. Father, with the help of “Central,” reached a doctor, who, after hours of anguish for my parents, arrived too drunk to be of any help. Furious, Father telephoned my Uncle Ray, who opened his pharmacy in the night and brought to the farm the medicine a sober doctor would have prescribed. He gave it to Mother illegally and, the next morning, forced the doctor to sign the prescription. No little brother or sister ever came to our house.

  The Library

  The summer I was five, farm life began to change. For the first time, the cookhouse did not come to our farm at harvesttime. No burly man with a wood stove built in a shack on a wagon bed cooked for our harvest crew. I did not get to hang around hoping, but never hinting, for a piece of pie.

  Instead, Mother and Grandma Atlee cooked for the crew. All the leaves were added to the oak dining table; dishes of jam, chowchow, and pickled peaches were set out. The two women worked frantically, peeling, mashing, frying, baking on the big wood range in the hot kitchen, trying to prepare dinner before the crew began to complain of hunger. Finally they rang the dinner gong to summon the sweaty, dusty, sunburned men, who trooped across the barnyard to wash at the sink on the back porch and wipe their hands and faces on the roller towel.

  As the men seated themselves, Mother and Grandma rushed in with platters of fried chicken, mountains of mashed potatoes, great bowls of green beans simmered with bacon for hours, piles of biscuits, coffee. More chicken, more string beans, biscuits, and coffee, followed by several kinds of pie.

  One thresher fascinated me. He had no teeth and ate with his knife. I stood as close as I could get to him, watching him scoop up food with his knife, looking up at his mouth to see how he managed. The other men were amused; he did not seem to mind. Later, when I tried to eat with my knife, Mother explained that only men who were old-timers ate with knives.

  Finally, when the men had eaten everything in sight, they returned to the threshing machine. I helped clear the table, and when Mother and Grandma began to wash dishes in water heated on the stove, Mother said, “Beverly, never, never, serve mashed potatoes to threshers. They disappear too fast.” To her mother she said, “What will the men think of me, running out of potatoes like that?”

  “Why didn’t the cookhouse come?” I asked.

  Mother sighed. “Because we simply don’t have the money. Most farmers don’t this year.”

  There were other hints that we did not have as much money as we would like to have. When the Chautauqua came to town, and men in suits gave what I considered boring lectures in a big tent, town children were excited about paying ten cents to drop a fishing line over a curtain and land a present. I was eager for my turn, but Mother whispered, “You mustn’t ask. We don’t have an extra ten cents.” Even though I was heavy with disappointment as we left and trudged down the boardwalk toward the farm, I managed not to cry, because Mother was so distressed.

  Then, one rainy afternoon, I was watching Mother try to retrim her hat when Father came in from the barn. “What are you building?” he asked, a clumsy attempt at a joke.

  Mother burst into tears. “I just can’t make it look like anything,” she said, “and I don’t know when I can ever afford a new hat.” I cried, too, so much did I want Mother to like her hat.

  As my parents grew downhearted, I grew increasingly restless. “Tell me a story, Mamma. Tell me a story,” I begged, or whined, until Mother was worn out. She had told me over and over every story she could remember: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Three Little Pigs,” “Chicken Little,” “The Little Red Hen.” She had recited every scrap of poetry she could recall. On Sundays my father read me “The Katzenjammer Kids” from the funny papers. Grandma Atlee continued to read the “Burgess Bedtime Story” from the newspaper, even though I never went to bed afterward.

  My picture books were a book of Jell-O recipes that showed shimmering pastel desserts, and advertisements in The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Country Gentleman. I looked for the fluffy yellow chick in the Bon Ami advertisement. “Hasn’t scratched yet,” Mother read when I asked her what the words said. The Dutch woman who carried a stick and chased herself around the can of Dutch Cleanser was a character I admired. To me, she stood for energy and hard work, two qualities necessary to livelihood on a farm. My favorite magazine characters were the Campbell Soup twins, chubby and happy, always playing together. I longed for someone to play with and wished I had a twin.

  I owned two books: the Volland edition of Mother Goose and a linen book, The Story of the Three Bears, in which Mother Bear, returning from her walk, carried a beautiful bouquet of purple violets. Mother read both books until I had memorized them.

  Mother, too, was starved for books, perhaps to take her mind off her worries. “Yamhill needs a library,” she said. “There is entirely too much gossip. People would be better off reading books.”

  Somehow, in spite of all her work, Mother summoned energy to start a campaign for a library. The editor of the Yamhill Record cooperated by writing articles expre
ssing the need for a county library “because there is no place in Yamhill where books can be obtained free,” and explaining that “a county library would cost a man whose property was assessed at $5,000 only $1.50 a year.”

  Mother, too impatient for voters to raise their taxes, and probably suspecting they wouldn’t, plunged ahead. She asked for donations of books and a bookcase or cupboard that could be locked. A glass china cupboard was carried upstairs to the Commercial Clubrooms over the Yamhill Bank. The community donated books, boring grown-up books with dull pictures that were a disappointment to me. Mother reported in the Record, “Little folks come in eager for a book and have to go home disappointed.”

  With this small beginning, Mother opened the library every Saturday afternoon, when country people came to town to shop and Uncle Ray put out in front of the drugstore his popcorn machine, where celluloid dolls bounced in the dancing popcorn. I looked forward to the walk uptown to the library, where, even if there were no books for children, I could sit in a leather chair with its stuffing coming out and be seen and not heard. I listened to talk with big words I did not understand, but I did understand when women spoke angrily about the high price of sugar and the cost of canning fruit and making jam when summer came.

  Mother persisted. She arranged a silver tea to raise money for the library, and someone gave a luncheon at which a woman played a saxophone solo. The library now had sixteen dollars! Mother called a meeting for the purpose of securing a traveling state library for Yamhill. The Record reported, “Twelve ladies were present who made up in enthusiasm for a lack of numbers.”

  Mother wrote that the library had sixty-four permanent volumes, including Dickens, Scott, Eliot, and Hawthorne, and concluded her article with, “It is said that a young girl who reads George Eliot’s Adam Bede will never give her parents much cause for worry.” She also cautioned, “Let every person donating a book first ask himself if the book contains anything that might cause young people to form wrong ideas.”